A consumer may be interested in knowing specific information about a product they either purchased or are interested in purchasing. In the instance of food, a consumer may want to know the origin of the food product, as well as who produced it, and how it was produced. Accordingly, many companies have chosen to make information regarding their supply chain freely available to consumers, illustrating the fact that the products they sell are manufactured in factories with safe working conditions, by workers that earn a fair wage, using methods that do not damage the environment.
As part of verifying the authenticity of a food product, such as the ingredients or the origin of the product, many companies utilize third-party certification programs. Some certification programs are generally founded on scheduled inspection of production, transfer, and distribution sites. For example, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) adopted such an approach for the USDA Organic certification program. Under that regime, any seller seeking to employ the USDA Certified Organic indicia on goods or materials had to be licensed and engage in periodic inspection by authorized verifiers. An enhancement to the certification approach was developed by Fairtrade (Transfair USA and other implementers) in order to increase the efficacy of their certification scheme. In addition to site inspection, Fairtrade certification incorporates an exclusivity requirement whereby retail sellers, as well as other agents along the chain of custody of the product, procure and handle Fairtrade certified products exclusively, which are also subject to inspection.
A problem with those certification programs is that there is limited regulation, such that third-party certifiers may face uncertainty as to whether a seller is correctly representing certification claims to the consumer. For example, current certification programs lack the ability to provide comprehensive regulation for a product as it moves through various stages of the supply chain and possibly exchanges hands multiple times. In the coffee industry, for example, a coffee product may be altered as it moves through the supply chain. During the distribution process, a batch of coffee may be partitioned into smaller portions for consumer purchase (e.g., a batch of roasted coffee beans may be partitioned into individual bags of coffee for retail). In instances such as this, it is difficult for a third-party to determine whether a seller is blending or substituting a certified product from a specific origin with a non-certified product from a different origin, and then representing the mixture as 100% certified. Without a mechanism to detect and constrain that type of activity, it is impossible for a third-party certifier to provide any assurance of validity to the consumer. Therefore, the value of such certification programs is greatly reduced, because the current certification programs allow for adulteration, fraud, or counterfeiting issues to occur, particularly in the food industry where a product is exchanged multiple times or is altered in some way.